It took 4 days for Rutherford to glean sufficient evidence by holding Teina Pora incommunicado in the Otahuhu police cells where, as the videos show, he bullied him and lured him by turn into a trap of life imprisonment for a crime the police had already decided that Pora had not committed. A crime which however much Rutherford 'fed' Pora information and details he, Pora, knew patently little about. 4 days has turned to 20 years and Pora is still in prison, recently refused parole for having a lighter in his cell and by reason of a couple of other petty misdeeds. 20 years and think back to those videos showing Rutherford offering Teina cigarettes and later getting hot under the collar because Teina wasn't revealinng what he didn't know but which Rutherford would tell him.
What a trap, and no wonder 2 decades later he might have a lighter in his cell and be able to enjoy a cigarette if he can get one. Not many people in New Zealand believe that Pora is guilty. Those people look expectantly at the 'system' to put things right. It's not a fair go, it's not even an attempt at a fair go, it's a straight out framing of a boy for a crime he didn't commit and which he continues to be held in prison because he won't admit what he hasn't done. He didn't kill Susan Burdett. Malcom Rewa killed her, maybe killed others, and raped over 20 women in one extended spree often attacking the head of his victims, just as Susan Burdett was attacked to the head and left dead by the lone rapist.
Rutherford knows the liklihood of Rewa's guilt, as does the Commissioner but they're holding on to the incredible co-incidence that a boy refused a lawyer, bribed into believing he was going to get a reward and willing to say whatever was required to profit from an idea most likely put into his mind by members of his own family was a killer despite police earlier clearing him of the crime. But what do you do? You petition the Governor General with new evidence showing the absurdity of the original trial evidence is even more fractured by time than it's incredulous start with a boy unable to point out the home, or even the street in which he is alleged to have killed a woman he'd never met and whom he couldn't physically describe. And then you wait.
You wait in a cell as Scot Watson waits, for 3 or 4 years now to find out the result of his own petition to the Governor General. You wait as does Allan Hall, long since released from prison but still fighting for his name to be cleared through the Governor General, waiting now into his second year. So just to put this in context Watson was arrested after an investigation of several months, Alan Hall in a similar short time and happened to be a small white man when all reports of the assailant in his case were of a tall dark, athletic man. Of course Teina Pora was held for 4 days illegally until there was 'enough' to charge him. What do they have in common? Fairly quick decisions by police of their guilt then literally decades trying to put the obvious right.
Many common denominators feature in these and similar miscarriages of Justice, but the most graphic must be the ineffectiveness of 'appeals' to the Governor General for either pardons or a return to the Courts. They just drag on for years, the poor cousin of the legal system and our lawyers do't seem bold enough to demand the rights of their clients under the Bill of Rights, or seek Judicial Reviews as to delays in the exercise of the Royal Prerogative. It seems that it is time to be bold and reach out to the Courts rather than abide antiquated and slothful poor cousins to Justice. No system that can lock away a man for 2 decades for a crime that he didn't commit should be tolerated, or indulged while taking an eternity to look inside itself when the obvious is apparent to all.
I'm pleased and disappointed at the same time that Pora's lawyers have put on hold his application to the Governor General (tardy as the response from that office has been) and gone directly to the Privy Council for a timely exercise of the appeal process. It's good that Pora's lawyers have pushed on, yet in doing so they've highlighted once again the beast that takes four days to steal a young man's freedom takes years to respond to evidence of the same man's evidence of his innocence. It isn't right, and all power to the lawyers and falsely imprisoned who push for their rights to have the Courts review their cases. No man or woman should be denied their rights to the Court and particular not through a 'figure head' that,while enshrined in statute, proves time inefficient and appears slumberous and favourable to the idea that 'due process' stops with a conviction.
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